


The Party

by Aya_A_Anderson



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Slavery, BDSM, F/F, M/M, Multi, Sexual Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 15:44:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9130978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aya_A_Anderson/pseuds/Aya_A_Anderson
Summary: In a world where young men and women pledge their bodies in the hopes of getting a leg up in the commercial sphere, Simean struggles to reconcile his feelings for the man who owns him and his love for the boy he left behind. Part 1/?.





	

It was a near success, she thought, only hindered by the man in the corner. The girls were pretty enough, their dresses short and tight, breasts bared in the modern fashion, collars slinking around their slim necks as they served the others. There were boys among them, the few who didn’t belong to the men and women seated around the low, circling tables.

 

Those who did belong tended to be seated on the laps or draped across the shoulders of their petitioners. Unlike the serving girls and boys, they were not dazed or tranced by drugs; they seemed content, even relaxed, in their desired state of dress or undress. The bands and bracelets they wore were expensive, often simple in their elegance.

 

“And who is this?”

 

Adel smiled at her. His free hand, the hand not holding his wineglass, gentled the dark hair on the head of a drunk young man, his fingers tightening in Adel’s shirt.

 

“Simean,” he told her. “A student of mine.”

 

“He’s lovely,” Eline said, smiling down at the boy. “He’s certainly handsome. Does he speak, your erastes?”

 

“Such an old-fashioned term.” He clicked his tongue, though fondly. “Simean will serve us all well, as far as his results go. The panel was quite enamored with him.”

 

A serving girl, dressed in deepest purple, bowed at the waist before offering her platter of food. Eline smiled at her, causing the girl to blush deeply. The man, Adel, accepted the food without comment, his attention returning almost immediately to his Simean; Eline, acting on suspicion, leaned closer to the serving girl to kiss the corner of her lip.

 

The girl’s eyes slipped shut.

 

“Open your eyes,” Eline ordered her, pulling back by a bare fraction. She watched carefully as the server’s eyes opened dazedly slow, and saw how they were rimmed with thick black lashes, her pupils blown with deep intoxication.

 

“Lovely,” she said, and patted the girl’s face. The girl was attractive, in the same generic sense as all the girls and boys who served them were. Abruptly, Eline thought of her own daughter: plainer, but sharper, more intelligent. Had Sarah been a boy, she would have certainly been petitioned by one such as Adel. As it were, the women had adopted a more civilized system of mentoring.

 

Someone, one of Eline’s girls, had gotten her hands on more of Eline’s drug supply. Midmorning was a gentle aphrodisiac she had developed as a more humane alternative to servile reconditioning, and her girls and boys had quickly grown addicted – they had all been so suspicious to start, they and the world, as had Adel to begin with in days before Simean had been a thought in his mother’s mind. Like the whole wide city had grown addicted: to their boys, their girls, to all their youth.

 

“I’m glad Simean could have the chance to enjoy himself while he’s young,” said Adel. His boy was stirring, blinking blearily up at him.

 

“Completely.”

 

She watched as Simean reached for Adel’s face, drawing him into a kiss. It seemed that Simean was one of those who had come to love his petitioner, who enjoyed his company beyond that which was obliged of him.

 

“Adel,” she said suddenly. She’d been caught by instinct, one she had learnt to trust. “There’s a gentleman over by the window who would very much like to speak to you. He is unpetitioned, but he seems to be quite a promising young man.”

 

The man himself draws back from the serving girl he had been talking to. She too was blushing, but that was nothing unusual. His eyes spoke of a trouble-starter, and Eline decided she would kill two birds with one stone by sending Adel over to talk to him.

 

Adel looked unamused, displeased to be torn from his erastes, but complied with a wry smile and another kiss to Simean’s bared neck. Eline watched as Adel cut a menacing path across the room, others moving for him as he made contact with the young man by the window. Eline had spoken to him only once, and through all his roughness she sensed a worker’s acumen few men that age possessed, these days. She often wondered if this was her own doing.

 

“Simean,” she said gently, taking a seat on the couch beside him. He seemed to be gathering himself, sitting up and taking a sip of the water eagerly handed to him by one of Eline’s favourites.

 

“Uh. Hello,” he said, dazed. He seemed bewildered by her presence, as if he had not registered it yet, or perceived his master talking to another. This boy had been drugged, and Eline wished to know the source of the calamity sweeping the tower’s servers as of late. She detested plans that weren’t in her control, and she was beginning to see the root of the problem lay not with her people, but with their petitioners.

 

“Hello. Simean – have you got another name? One you’d rather me call you by?”

 

“No,” he told her. As the poulticed water cleared his blood, his head began to rise. His grey eyes steadied, yet became more deferent. This was a conditioned young man, well-trained in ways Eline had rarely seen. The devotion he showed Adel surely helped. “I’m happy to be called Simean.”

 

“But you do have another name?”

 

He frowned. The bow of his head, the subtle rising of his shoulders, told her he had more than just forgotten his old name: he had forgotten, momentarily, that he’d ever had another. “I did. I do, I mean. My mother called me James. But at school they called me Red, for a bad dye job I had when I was thirteen.”

 

“A bad dye job? Did you dye your hair yourself?”

 

He smiled. Though a little vague, Eline’s line of questioning seemed to be doing the trick. “Straight out of a bottle. My mother was angry.”

 

“And you see your parents often?”

 

“My father’s dead,” he said, frowning more deeply. “My mother – I used to see her more often, when I first came to live with Adel. But I don’t see her so much anymore.”

 

“Why is that?”

 

Red laughed and shook his head. His hair was strawberry blonde, his face typically attractive in a clever sort of way, as if glasses would accentuate his features, more than conceal them. “I don’t know. I guess I just stopped thinking about seeing her as much.”

 

“I’m sure she appreciates the break,” said Eline, not one to question the whims of intelligent men: they were often simple, based on feelings of inadequacy and possession more than any legitimate reason to distance Simean from his parents, or his old life.

 

“I’ll call her,” he promised, more to himself than to Eline. “I’ll call her tomorrow, when Adel’s at work.” He muttered something else, a name Eline did not recognize.

 

“You feel free, with Adel? To do as you wish?”

 

Red seemed to think this an odd question, though odd in the sense he would have found it so before he’d entered petition. “I don’t know if I’d call it free. Adel lets me do what I want, so long as I’m not playing whore for the other men in his office.”

  
  
Eline thought, curiously, the word seemed natural from Red’s mouth, granted no more pause or inflection than any other in its sentence. “Not with other men,” she corrected, “But with your friends?”

 

“My friends are occupied these days,” Red said, with a wry smile. “There aren’t many of us left outside of the petition system, anyways.”

 

“There must be some,” Eline pressed, “Not everyone is honored with petitions.”

 

“The friend I am thinking of wouldn’t have considered it an honor. He hated me for what I did, for accepting Adel.”

 

“You blame pederasty?”

 

“Not entirely. The system is, after all, just a system. Blaming something so static would be futile. It’s how you interact with it that creates meaning.”

 

“You blame yourself,” said Eline, curious.

 

His voice was light, but his eyes seemed strangely lost as he told her, “I blame myself more than anything. I didn’t know this would ruin us, to such a degree. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d known. Sometimes, I think about what would’ve happened if I hadn’t accepted petition.”

 

“Thinking of the past in such a way is pointless,” she said gently. “The petition will serve you well in years to come. Your friend is wrong to judge you.”

 

“Respectfully,” said Red, and though his head was bowed, his eyes were fierce. “I may be wrong in blaming myself. But my friend isn’t wrong to judge me.”

 

She smiled, a sharp and frozen expression. This was a story she had heard before – it was her daughter’s story, the story she had told herself when she was young. Children often couldn’t see the simple truths for blindness. “Those who cannot move with the times risk being left behind,” she said.

 

“He’d say we were moving backwards.” Red’s fingers were in knots, tensed in his lap. It seemed as though he felt unwilling to speak and yet the truth was drawn out of him by the drug, by a lifetime of silence with Adel. “We used to laugh at them – I mean, the older boys who had to buy their way into the workforce with sex. We never thought of ourselves that way. As future candidates. Even when I first accepted the petition, moved in here, I didn’t think of myself as – Well. It was only after Adel fucked me that I thought I was a whore.”

 

Eline stared at him. She saw now why Adel enjoyed Simean so much – at the very least, he thought. “Red,” she said, “Your relationship is a partnership. That is the whole point of the system. They provide you with mentorship and good work, and you provide companionship for Adel.”

 

The boy seemed to straighten, the motion almost indolent in the variable calm of the room, with others kneeling there beside their petitioners, sitting politely in their laps or curled up against their shoulders. Simean was a contrast in self-possession; there was a simple steadfastness in the very way he moved.

 

“I’m not in the habit of lying to myself,” he said, “and the master doesn’t like it either.”

 

Eline’s skin itched for discipline, to discipline him, and wondered where his master preferred to lay his slaps. Simean was tall and lean, corded muscle, with skin smooth and pale enough to derive great satisfaction from the bruising of it. “You underestimate the value of your service, Simean. I may have phrased it wrongly; you give yourself to Adel to get ahead in life, utterly selfishly, without will of your own. Is that how your friend would phrase it?”

 

Simean was silent. His eyes flickered, over to where Adel stood engaged in conversation.

 

“Will you let me pet you?”

 

“Only if my master allows,” said Simean, in a tone that suggested his master would not be pleased by such an arrangement. Still, he turned in supplication to allow Eline to pet his spine and shoulders, her nails lightly grazing the column of his back and trailing across the curve of his buttocks, sending rippling gooseflesh across his neck and arms. A collection of formed parts.

 

“Very beautiful,” she said.

 

The boy shuddered, barely noticed, as she moved to massage the base of his scapula – he was distinctly warm, the last of the drug having yet to leave his system, and his cheeks were flushed to the touch.

 

“Years of this,” she murmured, ensuring her lips just barely grazed his ear, the soft skin behind it. “A dreadful burden, I know. Be good to him.”

 

She straightened as Adel approached. The boy was gone – Eline had seen no security, and felt satisfied.

 

“Yours,” said Eline, and Adel knelt to kiss her hand before turning his attention to the other boy: a measure in contrasts.

 

Red shuddered and relaxed into his hand at once, and Eline smiled as she stood, to take her leave.

 

.

 

Tyron was in his dreams, as he always was when Red had had too much to drink. He knew, as he always did, where he was and whom he slept with, who slept beside him in his bed, but in these moments he could to some extent believe there was a third with them.

 

Tonight, Tyron was on his knees. Red knew it had to be a dream – Tyron had refused all his life to kneel for anyone; in these dreams, he knelt for Red.

 

Were there context to the dream, Red also knew that Tyron would have accepted petition. It was impossible for two to accept petition to the same, but his dreams had never made sense. Even there, the idea of Tyron was so fantastical he stood a minute, staring at his face. They knew each other well, having known each other for as long as they had, and Red could recreate each detail of his face, the way his muscles moved as he smiled.

 

“Go on,” he said. The same, even his voice, even the smell of his hair as Red’s fingers wound into it, searching. The same, the way he kissed when Red reached down to meet him.

 

“Red,” he said, “I love-” and there was silence.

 

That was the same, too.

 

.

 

The first week had been a shock, the slap and rush of water carrying him out, and lying on his back he felt reassured in the knowledge that he couldn’t have known. He also felt a stinging behind his eyes, though he didn’t feel tired: he was exhausted only in the most primal sense, a soul-deep weariness he’d known twice before, if that. The first time, his mother had lost her job. That was before, when Red had been too young to petition. The second time was less certain. He and Tyron had been together for a night, weeks before Red had revealed his petition to him and Red had thought nothing could be worse.

 

For all the nights he’d spent dreaming, wanting for something vital and beating to change between them, he’d been too sick with fear, too hating of himself to give his all. And Simean had lain on his back in the low light, the sun perfectly set and sheets changed and everything so ready, so meticulously prepared, as if Tyron had been wanting too.

 

“Simean?” said Adel, quietly. It was the first time Adel had called him by name. His voice came as if through a wind-tunnel, a sort of auditory myopia. Red’s eyes were fixed on the ceiling; he wasn’t Tyron, this wasn’t a protest, and Adel didn't voice a command. Dully surprised, Red realized he hadn’t immediately recognized Simean as being his name. This was two weeks after, and four weeks after he had first slept with Tyron. Now, he couldn’t be sure why he’d done it – for himself, or because he hadn’t wanted Adel to be his first. It had been a paradoxical want, to conserve some of himself, to give it to Tyron, when in truth it hadn’t mattered. Simean had gone to Tyron: the part of him who hadn’t accepted petition, and Red – the other half, the pretty, drugged part of himself, had gone to Adel.

 

A triumvirate ownership: Tyron, Adel, and Eline. What did he own?

 

Himself, a box of matches – the only belonging he could take from home, fit slyly in a pocket – that he kept in a cupboard by the sink. His books.

 

By this point, he’d met Eline only once. The once was enough – the ceremony was deliberately placed and strategized to within an inch of modesty – the common sort of modesty they’d lost in recent years – and her as the centerpiece, the cornerstone of every system Red and Simean had banked their lives upon, in very different ways. She was symbolic, more than useful there, as the rites were signed in private. Eline had cut an imposing figure, tall and lean with almost menacing kindness, the sort of sweet that hurt to touch.

 

She was the first to command him to kneel. That, too, was symbolic, the order near beautiful in its simplicity. The ground had hit his knees like a drum, resonating, final as her hand came to rest on his head. Simean had seaed wildly for an out, for Tyron or his mother in the crowd – he’d seen his mother, but she had been crying. Tyron hadn’t come. After that, Red vaguely remembered, he’d been told to bow his head and the loop had been forced into the back of his neck.

 

Three years, the countdown set.

 

It was a warped parody of a graduation, chairs in tiered rows, priority seats. His name had him sit at the front of the hall where he could watch the others shake as this was done. He might have felt angry at this last frame of cruelty, but he felt nothing. Everyone had their moment and their place, and Red knew his.

 

He hadn’t expected her to remember him that night. His master had gone off to talk to someone else – a boy, young but not like him – and she had sat down beside him and asked him how he was faring. It wasn’t a question he could answer honestly or politely, and by that stage Red had been drugged into a near-stupor and he hadn’t been forced to fake his confusion, the vacant smile coming to his face as if it belonged there. This was Simean.

 

He’d known the boy. Even high and scared half into oblivion by the cold hand of Eline at his neck, he hadn’t felt jealous as his master had moved to speak to the other him, the boy who had been him before Red had even considered the option of petition. It was a face he recognized, more than even that. The other him had been an older boy from his school. Red drew upon the memory easily, like water from a tap. Simean’s brain was foggy. The boy had been one of the first to accept petition, several years ago, when the idea hadn’t been as palatable. There had been jokes and taunts, the simple cruelties of boys who didn’t truly believe them. They had all been raised on the idea, and anything was acceptable when your parents told you so, when your siblings and teachers and elders told you so. Except for Tyron.

 

The moment had lasted only seconds. The boy had looked at him, but Red didn’t know if he’d been recognized. It hadn’t told him much, but that for all his master’s other faults, he couldn’t deny Adel’s consistency.

 

“I can hear you thinking,” said Adel, from across the bed. He’d moved away as Simean had – Red had retreated, very deep inside him – and made no move to return, or even to touch him. It was too soon for him to tell if this was normal.

 

He felt Adel sigh. The motion sank the bed, and then Adel reached for his hand. Red recoiled, but Simean knew it wouldn’t do any good, and so he remained very still. “I want to hear it. If it’s insults, I can take it. Or if you don’t want to talk – I can talk enough for the both of us.”

 

Simean said, “Maybe you should talk. I don’t want to offend you.”

 

He felt Adel laugh, and turned to look at him; it was frustrating, having to feel his movements, having to feel his way through this silent world, all because Red refused to talk.

 

Adel said, “The man I was speaking to earlier is my former petition. I saw you looking at him.”

 

This was a lie. Red had heard Eline, had refused drink so he could pay closer attention – and they had always seemed to forget he was listening, first as a child, now as a slave.

 

There wasn’t anything Red could say, and he didn’t – but he wanted to know, just as Tyron had, what happened to Adel’s last petition? The man from the night before may not have been that, but he was alive somewhere, beginning life again. For Simean, it had always been a more gentle curiosity. For Tyron, it was everything, and Simean had watched it happen in installments, the slow obsession over what made up a world and Eline, as if the two were interchangeable.

 

“He left me about a year ago,” said Adel, without bitterness. “He was always capable. A little less academic than you, but a little more rebellious than you seem to be. He works for our department, now.”

 

Our department. It had been a while since Simean considered what Adel did with his life, other than petition impressionable young boys to fill his too-large apartment.

 

“What does he do?” Simean’s voice is rougher, deeper than he expects, and startles. Adel reaches over, under the covers, and clasps his hand.

 

“He’s a lawyer,” Adel replied.

 

Red wanted to study law. Part of him was pleased.

 

“Criminal?”

 

“Company. Far less exciting,” said Adel, and he chuckled. Adel’s laugh made him seemed older than he was. “You could say he cleans up my messes. You two would get along well.”

 

There was a pause. Then Adel said,

 

“Can I ask you something?”

 

Simean didn’t know what to say. Adel didn’t have to ask for Simean’s permission, and he didn’t know whether responding would cause him to seem presumptuous. He squeezed Adel’s hand.

 

The older man seemed bolstered by this sign of affection: the first Simean had shown of his own volition all week. “What did you and Eline speak about?”

 

“She asked me about my parents. Then she said I was well-behaved, and… She asked me if she could call me by my name. My other name.”

 

“It is your name,” said Adel. “It is still yours, even if I do not use it. There’s no shame in owning what is yours.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“I would like it if you called me master.”

 

“Thank you, master. I apologise.” The words came with near-worrying ease. The squeeze of his hand in return, the touch of Adel’s calf to his own as he moved nearer, felt nice.

 

“I would prefer it if you were not scared around me. I won’t hurt you.”

 

Then Simean said something – he didn’t entirely know what it was, most likely another ‘thank you, master’ or something equally contrived – but the part of him that was still called Red was thinking, hard. There were several paths he could take from here.

 

The first was simple. He could say his please and thank you masters, wait his turn politely, braced but wholly unprepared.

 

The second was not. Red knew it wasn’t in his nature to protest, but he could, he would do it anyway, if it spared him. If it wasn’t in Adel’s nature to hurt him, he could make use of it: Adel would not beat, lash or punish him for refusing him. Eline had said as much.

 

Simean looked at his options, and took the third. Red was a quiet presence in his head, reassuring.

 

Slowly, he reached down to touch Adel’s hand, letting his fingertips brush the back of it. The skin was lightly age-worn and felt very warm. Adel turned to look at him, and Simean allowed himself to return it for a moment. Then he touched Adel’s thigh – a single, deliberate motion Red reassured him would be enough.

 

“It will be easier when you relax,” said Adel, voice no more than a growl. His finger bruised a path up Simean’s stomach.

 

“I’m sorry,” said Simean.

 

“You don’t have to apologise. You are entitled to feel however you want.”

 

Adel’s hand paused, still and large enough to be a threat, but Simean couldn’t see this man hurting him. He wondered if Adel had a wife and children, and if he’d lost his wife and couldn’t bring himself to find another. That was often the story, the older boys had said, and they’d looked at each other knowingly as if they knew anything about the men who were to buy them.

 

“That man, the one who used to be your - how did he –. What was he –”

 

Simean broke off, frustrated that the words still wouldn’t come. Adel seemed to understand.

 

“He was very much like you are now,” Adel told him. “Full of doubt and still very much attached to the old way of things. I told you, he had an angrier, more violent disposition than you seem to.”

 

Simean recoiled at violence, the same as Tyron lusted for it. It was what had driven Tyron to steal from well-to-do families and loot the old shopping complexes and empty houses outside the city, and to commit acts of vandalism for its own sake. Tyron would rather go down fighting than willingly lay himself at another’s feet and, on that base level, they had never understood each other.

 

“And what was he like after a year?”

 

“Comfortable,” said Adel, firmly. “Well-adjusted.”

 

“And when he left?”

 

“The same. He was itching to move out into the world. The whole thing made me feel old. Well,” he amended, “older than I am.”

 

“Did he ask for sex?”

 

Simean had spoken on impulse, guided into complacency by Adel’s voice. He regretted it instantly – his lungs burned with embarrassment, and Simean made a small noise and shut his eyes, longing to sink down into the mattress and never come out.

 

Adel made an amused sound, not quite a laugh. “Open your eyes. Yes, he did, after he realized I had no plans to murder him in his sleep. And you should sleep too.”

 

Simean didn’t argue, and Adel didn’t speak again.

 

He’d found himself lying awake for hours every night, sleeping in fits until the pounding of his heart lurched him back into the dark room with a man he barely knew. When he did sleep, the dreams were of Tyron, and they were never good.

 

Today, Simean turned to lie on his stomach. He felt warm and relaxed. Adel put a hand on the back of his neck – below the collar – and Simean was unconscious before he had time to wonder at how strange it felt to be held.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Better finished than perfect. Rated ex for insurance reasons (future parts). This is mine, all mine - stealing is against the law.


End file.
